Posted by
Andrews on Sunday, July 19, 2009 3:01:20 PM
Sorry for the intermittent silences, but I have been distracted by numerous family and work matters, making it hard to both post and respond to comments.
However, I do have to add one comment. I had forgotten about a particularly apt quote when I wrote my post "
How to Handle Idiots", but I recalled it this morning. In that post, I argued the best way to deal with idiots is to let them suffer the consequences of their own idiocy, and that goes for discrimination as well. (Note that the discrimination so often mentioned, Jim Crow, was not private, but forced on businesses by the state. Think about that, and then about the fact that most modern laws are premised upon not state, but private discrimination.)
Well, a strange source has a particularly apt analogy. Mike Nelson, the one-time star of
Mystery Science 3000 and sometime movie critic, in a book of movie reviews, once criticized those who protested against
Basic Instinct. His argument was that they forgot they were protesting a terrible movie. As he put it, if you are offended by an episode of
Webster, you don't protest, you just ignore it and let it go away.
I feel the same way about discrimination. (As I also argued in "
A Statute of Limitations for Race" and its earlier incarnations "
Some Logical Problems With Reparations", "
Mainstreaming hate" and "
Private Versus Public Racism".) By and large, discrimination is so strongly opposed by social pressures today that I doubt it would exist were laws not in place making whites resentful, while convincing minorities that all their ills are the fault of whites and "institutional racism". Clearly, not all of it would vanish. I am sure there would be clubs open only to men or women, societies for Hispanics, and blacks, and maybe whites, but in 99% of the cases, commercial ventures would be forced to treat all races and sexes the same. And is that such a bad outcome? Do we need to fully and completely integrate every club, society and corner bar before the world is a good place? Must every single individual express the enlightened sensibilities of a gender and race studies major before we can rest at night?
As the solution proposed by the left involves massive violations of personal rights, and still has not done what it claimed it would, and in 45 years, I have to say that doing nothing and accepting a few bits of discrimination around the edges, discrimination by
ALL groups, is acceptable, and much better than violating everyone's rights to not only get worse results, but to fuel the fires of racism for generations to come.
Having said that, I now will take my leave for a while, hopefully to get a bit of sleep, as my son got me up at quarter of seven this morning. If I feel up to it later, I will try to finally write the posts I keep promising. If not, then I will do my best to get to them tomorrow.